Recently, environmental issues, such as global warming caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and energy issues, such as the exhaustion of oil reserves, have been dramatically on the rise. As a result, hydrogen energy as an environmentally-friendly alternative energy source has attracted greater attention.
In order to allow for the practical use of hydrogen energy, various techniques for storage, transportation, and generation of hydrogen in a safe and efficient way have been actively developed.
Among a plurality of methods of hydrogen storage, a method for using a hydrogen storage material capable of reversibly storing and releasing hydrogen is highly desired in a storage medium for hydrogen to be applied to an electric vehicle.
Carbon materials such as activated carbon, fullerene, nanotubes, and hydrogen storage alloys such as LaNi5 and TiFe are widely known as hydrogen storage materials.
Among these materials, a hydrogen storage alloy is widely and preferably used as a hydrogen storage material for storage and transportation of hydrogen, since the hydrogen storage alloy has a higher hydrogen density per unit volume than that of a carbon material.
However, hydrogen storage alloys such as LaNi5 and TiFe include rare metals such as La, Ni, and Ti, which leads to problems associated with securing resources and a high cost.
Furthermore, conventional hydrogen storage alloys containing a considerably heavyweight alloy itself have an innate drawback, in that a significantly heavyweight alloy is required to store large quantities of hydrogen.
In order to overcome the above-mentioned problems, various techniques regarding hydrogen storage materials containing light elements have been developed.
The developed hydrogen storage materials which contain the light elements include: (1) a complex hydride containing lithium (Li) such as LiNH2 and LiBH4; (2) a complex hydride containing sodium (Na) such as NaAlH4; and (3) a complex hydride containing magnesium (Mg) such as Mg(NH2)2.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only to enhance the understanding of the background of the disclosure and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.